GTA residents rush to offer help,
‘We can’t keep up with the calls,’ says Lifeline Syria spokeswoman
The phones are ringing off the hook at Lifeline Syria’s downtown Toronto office. Suddenly, everyone is offering to volunteer or find out information about privately sponsoring a Syrian refugee.
Its website — which on a good day usually gets a mere 300 views — suddenly, in 24 hours, has seen something like 1,600 visits.
A haunting image of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi dead on the beach after he, his brother and mother drowned attempting to cross from Turkey to Greece has galvanized many in the GTA about the Syrian refugee crisis.
“We can’t keep up with the calls,” said Naomi Alboim, a member of the executive of Lifeline Syria, which was founded earlier this summer to help private groups sponsor 1,000 Syrian refugees and bring them to the region over the next two years.
“We have had hundreds of emails. It’s just been amazing.”
Adds Ratna Omidvar, founding executive director of the Global Diversity Exchange at Ryerson University and chairwoman of Lifeline Syria: “I’ve had tearful calls, angry calls, calls offering help, money. All of that as a result of this. Why does it take an image like that to bring us to our knees?”
Since Lifeline Syria, a local-led initiative, began this summer, some 30 groups — including a group from Ryerson University which is pledging to sponsor 11 families — have come together to help privately sponsor Syrian refugees, said Alexandra Kotyk, executive director of Lifeline Syria.
Kotyk says the organization realistically needs 200 groups to come together and sponsor the refugees they’d like to bring to the GTA.
But privately sponsoring refugees is a complex process — that not only involves promising to be financially responsible for a family (the sponsoring group must pledge to provide about $27,000 for a family of four for a year) but also requires the completion of layers of paperwork and lengthy delays.
That long delay and lengthy process prompted her group to address the issue in a letter to Minister of Immigration Chris Alexander earlier this summer. In it were ideas to streamline the process — including the suggestion that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees documentation currently required for private sponsorship no longer be needed as well as a request that more resources be put into the refugee system so applications would be processed faster.
The letter went unanswered, she says.
Dr. Aliya Khan, a gerontologist who teaches at McMaster University, is part of a group sponsoring a Syrian refugee family. So concerned about the plight of Syrian refugees, she formed a group called Support of Refugees in Dire Need and then turned to Lifeline Syria for help.
Her group, along with a mosque, a United Church and a synagogue in Oakville, have all come together to sponsor a family of seven — five children and two adults who are now in Jordan. That family is expected to arrive next spring.
“The problem we are facing is that we can only bring refugees who have the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees status (here),” she says. “And 90 per cent of those people don’t have that status because the UNHCR doesn’t have the manpower to process everyone. Many people are sitting in these camps in inhumane conditions.”
She is also concerned that the program for Syrian refugees may discriminate against Muslim Syrians.
“We want our government to recognize priority should be given based on vulnerability,” Khan said, “and not based on ethnicity or religion.”